A Playful Couple

Rico and Ally were being quite playful this morning, so i thought I'd take a few candids. As you can see Rico decided to make a few moves on Ally, but I think she wasn't too amused. 

A Kool Car?

As I was driving to work today, I followed a Dodge Aries K car for part of the way. Yes, the venerable "K" car...boxy, boring, and anything but exciting. But this K car was different, it was clean, it had a shiny grey paint finish, polished chrome and...get this, dark TINTED windows. I don't know why i found it amusing, but it was. Maybe I chuckled at the thought of someone buying an old K car to restore it or even "soup" it up. I wondered if it had any engine or exhaust mods (although none were visible). Wouldn't that be something..a turbo-charged Dodge Aries K car. That would be the ultimate sleeper car--imagine that passing your sports car on the highway.

Victoria Day Long Weekend in Whistler

Thank goodness for long weekends. I was really looking forward to the Victoria Day long weekend, and it didn't disappoint. Yvonne was able to snag a really good deal on a condo near the Chateau Whistler (thanks, again Yvonne!). The place was huge, with two bedrooms, two baths, a loft, vaulted ceilings, patio, and living room and kitchen -- we made full use of the space as there were nearly 12 of us!

It was pissing rain as Niki, Debs and I drove up on Sat morning, but the sun managed to make an appearance by noon. Once we arrived, I made a last minute decision to try out the Whistler Bike Park with Dana. I dropped almost $100 for a bike rental and day pass. After the first couple runs, i realized my road cycling helmet wasn't gonna cut it, and got a full-face helmet. About 4 hrs and 12+ runs later, I managed to leave the park without serious injury :) thanks Dana!

Later in the evening we all made our way to the Longhorn pub for some suds, pool, darts and good company. Its too bad the Village has been overun by drunk rowdies (even the Hells Angels were there) + the club lines were a little too long, so most of us headed back to the condo a little early to get some rest. I slept in till about 11am. Niki and I made some sandwiches for the gang, and the whole group met up at Alta Lake. We all put ourselves in super- relaxation-not-a-care-in-the-world mode, and hung out in the sun before heading back to the condo for dinner. Afterwards, some of us then headed down to the pool and hottub. Unfortunately, the pool was under maintenance what apparently was a high "sulfuric acid" concentration--ewwww ;-) After some time in the hot tub, we headed back to the room for the much awaited Cranium and Pictionary tourney! I'm surprised the noise police didn't drop by cuz we had a riot - marked by fierce trash talking, crazy laughter and even some "spitting" -- all in good fun of course.

We checked out the next morning, but the weekend didn't end there, as we made our way back to the lake to veg out again in the sun to play cards (damn SlapJack hurts!), build human pyramids, canoeing, and some touch football.

All in all, it was an awesome weekend in the company of some awesome friends (some of them i hadn't seen in 5+ years!). At the very least, I give props to Queen Victoria, for giving us a good reason for the extra day off ;-)

Sunset on Borocay Beach, Philippines. I wish i were back here again. By the way, this posting tool for photos is pretty nifty! 

experimenting...

I've just discovered how to write blogs via e-mail. I've also decided to try using Blogger's comments feature instead of Haloscan for a more consistent look and feel. If you don't have a blogger account please write your name in the comment body...

 

Time to play with this CSS stuff now...

American Idol: Disco Days

I've been a little late on posting these updates from Debbie...but here's the latest on just before the results are announced!

Jasmine--oooo....not up to snuff with the other girls on both songs.
Poor girl started crying on stage after her evaluation. I don't
think she should feel too bad b/c 4th place isn't awful among the
tens of thousands that auditioned. She's got a nice voice, it's just
not up to par with the other ladies.

La Toya--Again, I thought she was great. Liked both songs but the
Thelma Houston, "Don't Leave Me this Way" was just awesome. After
the judges critiqued her first song about not showing personality, I
found she really tried to show more oommph into her performance and
was more personable than reserved.

Fantasia--Liked her first song better ("knock on Wood") than her
second song. It was a good performance all around. She's very
consistent and has proven that she can sing pretty much anything.

Diana--Wow, she was my favourite last night. Disco was her element
and she was just ggrrreat! Go Diana! I don't know how she'll do
competing against the La Toya and Fantasia next week but it's been
quite a ride for her. Good for her.


Unless it's some kind of huge upset like the Jennifer Hudson fiasco,
I think Jasmine's going home tonight.

so what do u think?

I was such a geek tonight. I just spent the evening optimizing a DSP algorithm on paper (for work, of course). (Hmm..i wonder if my compiler doesn't already replace integer multiplies with bit shifts, cuz if it doesn't i'm gonna save a whole lot of cycles!!) And then i just spent the last hour playing with the new Blogger UI and templates. I settled on this look. I kinda like it better than my last one....but it could use some more tweaking. I gotta learn to this crap myself though...CSS, PHP, RSS, XML, blah blah...i already have enough acronyms at work to deal with....

Go Flames Go

With all due respect to the canucks, I'm proud of the Flames. They deserved to win yet another thrilling game last night. I can only imagine the insanity that filled the streets of Calgary. I guess Vancouver could take comfort in the fact that the Flames disposed of a more talented and skilled team in 6 games instead of 7.